Doug Elmendorf, formerly of all the major public sector economic policy institutions (specifically the Federal Reserve Board, U.S. Treasury Department, Council of Economic Advisors, and Congressional Budget Office) and then the Hamilton Project at Brookings, will replace Peter Orszag at CBO. Elmendorf’s a moderate Democrat who wins praise from Greg Mankiw. I liked this paper he co-authored on the Bush tax cuts some months ago which concluded that “the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts made most U.S. households worse off” while helping to further enrich the already richest.

Readers may be interested in this and this from him on TARP. I’d be interested to know what’s the nature of the norm that ensures that the CBO Director’s job seems to stay consistently in the hands of broadly respected moderates even during a time of massively increasing polarization inside the congress.

One also wonders if Elmendorf will continue the CBO blog and/or whether Orszag will be blogging from his new perch at OMB.

This move by pharmaceutical companies to stop handing out random trinkets to doctors seems like a pretty cynical move to me:

Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.

No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.

Doctors are well-paid professionals, none of them are going to seriously compromise patient care in exchange for a mug or a pen. But if you read Marcia Angell’s New York Review of Books article on the vast web of corruption between drug companies and medical professionals, you’ll see that mugs and pens have nothing to do with anything. We’re talking about serious cash. Things like a doctor who “failed to disclose approximately $500,000 he received from GlaxoSmithKline for giving dozens of talks promoting the company’s drugs.” Or this:

Senator Grassley found that Schatzberg controlled more than $6 million worth of stock in Corcept Therapeutics, a company he cofounded that is testing mifepristone—the abortion drug otherwise known as RU-486—as a treatment for psychotic depression. At the same time, Schatzberg was the principal investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health grant that included research on mifepristone for this use and he was coauthor of three papers on the subject.

This is big bucks, serious stuff. The branded mugs and such were, if anything, the achilles heel in the drug companies’ perversion of the process — patients could see the stuff, and the stuff has corporate logos on it. It’s a visual reminder that for all you know your doctor is prescribing courses of treatment that are in line with his financial interests rather than with your health interests. By adopting a new “no mugs” policy the companies are helping to re-obscure their financial relationships with doctors and at the same claim claiming to be cleaning up their act. It’s clever, but it’s not good.

Jack Balkin and Mark Tushnet argue that the Senate can, in fact, refuse to seat Roland Burris.

Meanwhile, since I don’t think I’ve said this before, we should all be clear that Burris and Bobby Rush are really behaving in an irresponsible manner here. It would have been the simplest thing on earth for Burris to just resist the temptations of higher office and say “no” to Blagojevich’s scheme here. It’s very hard to imagine that their actions over these past couple of days are advancing the cause of progressive politics or the interests of African-Americans. See also this, this, and this from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, warns that card-check legislation and increased unionization could “force jobs overseas.” Elsewhere in the piece he extols the virtues of lowering trade barriers and shares other pearls of wisdom he gleaned while “driving from New Delhi to Agra.” It is, of course, hard to take this concern trolling about jobs shifting overseas all that seriously when one assumes the point of his “recent delegation of world technology leaders to India” was precisely to explore opportunities for shifting jobs overseas.

But credibility aside these concerns are hard to square with the data. Consider this page where you’ll learn that union density is 80 percent in Denmark, 74 percent in Finland, 46 percent in Luxembourg, 35 percent in Ireland, and 25 percent in Switzerland compared to just 12 percent in the United States. These are all very small countries that depend much more highly on foreign trade than does the United States. And yet despite their much larger proportion of union members, none of these countries have seen their employment all drift overseas.

Countries don’t become prosperous by having extremely low wages. Countries have low wages because they’re poor. Countries prosper by having reasonable quality infrastructure and a reasonably healthy and well-educated population. Unions can neither magically create wealth out of thin air, but neither can they magically destroy wealth. What they can do is influence at the margin the way wealth is distributed — a bit more to the workforce and somewhat less to the managers and the shareholders. That’s why people who represent the interests of managers and shareholders don’t like them. It’s a perfectly understandable sentiment, but not one that the broader public should find persuasive.

Ezra Klein quotes Dan Conley on what Blago’s trying to accomplish:

The appointment of Burris is a pure impeachment-defense tactic from Blagojevich. First, he’s making a public case that no crime was actually committed. If Burris was appointed without any quid pro quo (highly likely, since Burris has no great wealth or influence), then Blagojevich can argue that all the talk about other possible appointments were just that — talk. And talk is not a crime. Is anyone going to buy that? Well, even if only ten percent of Illinois voters buy it, Blagojevich will have doubled his support, so why not? There’s a certain freedom in nearly complete unpopularity.

But second, and more important for Blagojevich’s survival plans, he’s chosen to play the race card. To anyone who thought that the election of Barack Obama would diminish the power of racial politics, today’s press conference was depressing — especially the appalling spectacle of Rep. Bobby Rush using the word “lynch” in reference to criticism of Burris, then Blagojevich repeating the phrase while wagging a finger at the press corp on the way out of the room. For a Governor looking to rally support in the House and Senate to avoid impeachment or convinction, it’s a smart move. A combination of African American and Latino Senators could be sufficient to save Blagojevich from a conviction in the Illinois Senate. It probably won’t work, but Blagojevich has few options left.

I really wouldn’t underplay what’s in the first paragraph. If you read Patrick Fitzgerald’s official complaint against Blagojevic, I think you’ll reach the conclusion that the criminal case against him on the Senate seat issue isn’t very strong. There’s other, better stuff in the indictment, but that particular charge seems to have been brought somewhat prematurely. I’d say that was a reasonable use of a prosecutor’s discretion — actually sitting on the wiretap until the seat had already been auctioned off would not have served the public interest. But it means Fitzgerald is moving forward with a relatively weak charge.

Under the circumstances, for Blago to have granted everyone’s requests for him to leave the seat unfilled would have been something of an admission of guilt. Conversely, making an appointment and making it a clean one — a qualified guy who’s not discussed on any of the wiretaps and who isn’t offering any bribes — has a lot of exculpatory power in terms of mounting a criminal defense.

The whole thing, however, serves as a reminder that this problem is a problem in the first instance for the Illinois legislature. The criminal justice system, quite rightly, moves deliberately and requires certain standards of evidence. But a political process such as an impeachment can move at a different pace and can properly employ different standards. And faced with this sort of public corruption the imperative isn’t on getting the guy to do jail time, it’s on getting the guy out of office so the people of Illinois can have a real governor. It’s a bit bizarre that it’s taking them so long — they need to hurry up and remove the man from office.

Paul Krugman has a graph of price-rent ratios normalized so that the 2000 level is defined as 100:

One interesting thing about this is that you could have been looking at this data in May 2002 and decided that Las Vegas real estate was overvalued. And I think someone who thought that will be vindicated over time. But at the same time, you could have looked at this data in May 2002, bought property in Las Vegas, and sold it five years later for a healthy profit. You could even have waited for the Las Vegas market to be clearly on the downswing and still made plenty of money. Which is part of the general problem with bubble psychology — the mere fact that a bubble is under way doesn’t necessarily make it irrational to hop on the bandwagon.